Commercial and Technical - Go together like a Horse and Carriage

Sorry about the silly title. If you don't know songs older than I am you'll be lost. Don't worry- you haven't missed much.

I was born commercial, it is in my genes. My Mum's family ran a sweet shop and a pub. She has spent most of her life counting money (usually trying to avoid spending it). My Dad was a third generation department store chain manager (Bobby's, you may have heard of it) and indeed complied with the old adage "rags to rags in three generations". My earliest memories of Dad were of him wondering around the shop looking for customers to chat up or boxes to unpack.

Looking back, this has guided my career sub-consciously. As a slightly gifted mathematician, I could have ended up in finance or statistics or something, even in Shell. But I only found passion when landing as a retail rep, chatting up customers, counting money and unpacking boxes on the petrol stations of Northern Ireland. Until I developed the passion for talent development, only commercial jobs were really fun, and that is where I ended up spending most of my career.

Then I landed in GS, with most people highly technical and getting their passion from technology and making things work. At first it was like being on another planet, but I've slowly learned the language, at times with fun and at other times through gritted teeth. I suppose I still run away from technical things, even outside work, with a mental model that they are someone else's domain.

Quite often I hear people classify problems, jobs, even whole businesses, into commercial or technical. Without trying to claim that there is no such segmentation, I do feel that it is a simplification which does more harm than good. The risk is that, as an individual, as a team, as a business, we restrict our vision to our favourite view and miss the potential of another lens.

I believe that is why we have an issue in GS with "talking customer language". Customer language is usually about money, or about change or people, or about customer outcome. Sure, how the machines work and the processes fit together is an integral part of achieving all these, and specialist input is required for those elements, but it does sure help if we can find common language so we can find joint solutions.

The forced segmentation occurs in many places. Think about it. We give applicants technical interviews and behavioural/commercial interviews. We run technical courses and technical skillpools, and let people go on other courses as a bonus. There are other examples, and, while none of them are bad, the overall effect gets in the way.

Of course it used to be worse, and the formation of GS itself created massive energy at the interface. But are we still going forward? What could we do better? For me the starting point is to avoid unnecessary boxes and to jump out of the we are encouraged into. It is scary - like learning a foreign language, at the beginning it is embarrassing and every time we improve we see another mountain to climb, and we find opt outs by getting the partner to use our language rather than vice versa.

I'm going to start looking for the boxes, and fight to break them down when I see them. Who will join this campaign?